An Explainable Approach Based on Emotion and Sentiment Features for Detecting People with Mental Disorders on Social Networks

Mental disorders are a global problem that widely affects different segments of the population. Diagnosis and treatment are difficult to obtain, as there are not enough specialists on the matter, and mental health is not yet a common topic among the population. The computer science field has proposed some solutions to detect the risk of depression, based on language use and data obtained through social media. These solutions are mainly focused on objective features, such as n-grams and lexicons, which are complicated to be understood by experts in the application area. Hence, in this paper, we propose a contrast pattern-based classifier to detect depression by using a new data representation based only on emotion and sentiment analysis extracted from posts on social media. Our proposed feature representation contains 28 different features, which are more understandable by specialists than other proposed representations. Our feature representation jointly with a contrast pattern-based classifier has obtained better classification results than five other combinations of features and classifiers reported in the literature. Our proposal statistically outperformed the Random Forest, Naive Bayes, and AdaBoost classifiers using the parser-tree, VAD (Valence, Arousal, and Dominance) and Topics, and Bag of Words (BOW) representations. It obtained similar statistical results to the logistic regression models using the Ensemble of BOWs and Handcrafted features representations. In all cases, our proposal was able to provide an explanation close to the language of experts, due to the mined contrast patterns.

Automated summary

Mental disorders are a global issue, and computer science offers solutions for detecting depression based on social media analysis. This paper introduces a contrast pattern-based classifier that utilizes emotion and sentiment analysis from social media to achieve better classification results.